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D6 SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2011 •
timescolonist.com | TIMES COLONIST
MONITOR
WHL is a better fit for Victoria, fans say
CLEVE DHEENSAW
Times Colonist
Maybe only politics or religion
draws out stronger convictions
than sports debates.
Rob Taggart and Geoff Sutcliffe are former ECHL Victoria
Salmon Kings season-ticket holders carrying over as season-ticket
holders for the Victoria Royals of
the Western Hockey League.
But they are not necessarily of
one mind. Sports fans rarely are.
“I liked the ECHL because I liked
watching professional men play
hockey,” said Sutcliffe, who
taught junior high school for 38
years before retiring.
“For 70 to 75 per cent of the
players, the WHL will be the end
of the road. So to make it past junior to pro hockey, even if it isn’t
the NHL, is quite an accomplishment and shows that the ECHL
was good hockey.
“But that’s not to say I’m not
excited about the Royals. It’s that
chance to see that one kid on your
team who may go on to be a superstar in the NHL.”
Taggart, however, won’t miss
the ECHL as much. “The WHL is
the right move for Victoria,” said
the computer sales representative.
“It’s the better fit for us. You’re
not going to have roster changes
where the [ECHL] players disappear for two or three weeks [to
the AHL] and then return.”
Like Sutcliffe, Taggart is a dedicated and knowledgeable hockey
fan.
Ironically, he moved to Victoria
from Richmond the summer the
WHL Cougars departed for Prince
George in 1994 and never got to
see the Cats play.
Taggart became a season-ticket
holder of the Victoria Salsa [now
Grizzlies] of the B.C. Hockey
League and switched to the
Salmon Kings when pro hockey
came to town in 2004.
“I think the WHL will work better in Victoria,” he said. “I love
that age group of players. These
are young kids trying to take the
next step up. Plus, the continuity
of following their careers, and the
closer rivalries in the WHL, add a
lot more to local hockey than the
ECHL could. And I like that we’re
getting a team that’s been around
for five seasons [the Chilliwack
Bruins moved to become the Royals] and not a start-up.”
Dave Dakers, president of RG
Properties sports and entertainment division and president of the
Royals and ex-president of the
Salmon Kings, said Salmon Kings
season-ticket holders have had a
125 per cent renewal rate for the
Royals (meaning some bought
more season tickets). Dakers said
only five to seven per cent of
Salmon Kings season-ticket holders didn’t renew for the Royals.
“I believe we’ve blended two
great organizations,” he said.
“Our Salmon Kings business
side was very experienced and
well run and it joins together with
[former Chilliwack GM/head
coach and now the same with the
Royals] Marc Habscheid’s hockey
side of things,” said Dakers.
As far as the merits of the
switch, well, Victoria hockey fans
will debate that for a long time.
As is their wont. They are, after
all, sports fans and that’s what
they do.
>FROM PAGE D1
City had long wait for WHL franchise
retty much everybody in
the hockey world knew
this moment was eventually coming for Victoria.
That it took so long to
return the WHL to one of the most
attractive markets in Western
Canada was the big surprise.
Potential WHL owners would
look at the sad state of the old
Memorial Arena. So a new rink
came into being — after a typically torturous Victoria process,
taking several years to do what
most other cities get done far
more expeditiously. But this market was still overlooked for a
WHL franchise when the new
Memorial Centre opened in 2005.
Arena operator RG Properties
of Vancouver needed an anchor
tenant and was forced to go the
minor-professional route in the
ECHL. The Victoria Salmon Kings
era — diverting in that Bull
Durham fashion of minor-pro
sports — lasted seven years.
“We didn’t put a time line on it
[getting a WHL franchise],” said
Dave Dakers, president of RG
Properties sports and entertainment division, and also president
of the Royals.
“The ECHL was a good option
considering our situation at the
time. We needed to find the best
opportunity for the WHL and take
the right steps.”
It almost came with the new
rink.
“We were at the final documentation phase to move Tri City
[Americans of the WHL] here in
2004. But for a number of reasons
that deal came apart,” said Dakers.
Ironically, elements of that
package have come full circle
seven years later.
The WHL managed to salvage
the Americans franchise and keep
it in Tri City, Washington, while
granting its disgruntled former
ownership a new franchise in
Chilliwack.
And now the Bruins are the
Royals.
Hockey can be a funny world.
“In one sense, we got the same
team we almost had in 2004,”
noted Dakers. “Hockey is a small
community.”
It is also a world of distinctive
pools of interest. While it can be
argued that Americans “get”
minor-pro leagues such as the
ECHL — where many WHL grads
end up after junior, by the way —
Canadians don’t as readily.
The great Canadian comfort
zone in hockey below the NHL is
junior, and the three major-junior
leagues in particular, of which the
WHL is one. Even the other form
of junior — the Junior A product
such as the B.C. Hockey League
— is considered a bit foreign to
Canadian tastes because the best
of those players are being
groomed for the U.S. collegiate
NCAA.
So now back in our comfort
zone, the WHL should be an easy
sell in Victoria, right?
“It’s safe to say it is an easier
sell,” said Dakers, picking his
words carefully.
“People understand the product.”
Season-ticket sales for the Royals are approaching the 3,000
plateau, while the Salmon Kings in
their best days pushed around
2,400 before dipping dramatically
in the waning seasons.
In those dwindling days of the
Salmon Kings, fans couldn’t help
but notice that several rink-board
spaces and arena backlit signs
were left empty as the sell
became tougher. Now Dakers
said the back-lit signs that encircle the seating bowl are sold out
and only three rink-board spaces
remain. He added that “75 to 80
per cent” of luxury suites are now
sold.
Another thing that will help the
bottom line is that the Salmon
Kings were pros who got paid and
stayed in apartments the team
had to pay for. The Royals are juniors and are billeted by local host
families and basically only
receive spending stipends. The
Salmon Kings flew to away games
while the Royals will take the bus.
Dakers said the annual operat-
P
LYLE STAFFORD, TIMES COLONIST
Victoria Royals president Dave Dakers, left, and coach/general manager Marc Habscheid at the Royals’ new home at the Save-on-Foods
Memorial Centre.
ing budget for the Salmon Kings
was $3 million and that the Royals
should be “15 to 20 per cent less.”
“It was the air travel that
mostly made the ECHL more
expensive [than operating in the
WHL],” he said.
So fans might think RG Properties and Royals owner Graham
Lee of Vancouver, who reportedly
paid $5.5 million for the Bruins
franchise, would be laughing all
the way to his financial institution.
ut although the WHL is easier to market on the Island
than the ECHL, and brings
fans here back into the familiar
Canadian hockey orbit of majorjunior, Dakers said it is still a
process that will take many years.
“Getting to be part of the fabric
of a community is a lot of hard
work and that takes more than
just changing the letters of the
leagues,” he said.
“It’s not quite as simple as saying people here ‘get’ the WHL a lot
easier than they ‘got’ the ECHL. A
lot of things still have to occur.”
Dakers used the example of
Kelowna, where RG Properties
operates Prospera Place
(but unlike in Victoria with the
Royals, doesn’t own the WHL
B
main tenant Rockets).
“WHL franchises are all about
peaks and valleys,” he said.
“The franchise came to
Kelowna after struggling in
Tacoma and then struggled again
in Kelowna during four seasons in
the old rink and even for the first
two years in the new building
[Prospera Place]. Since then, it’s
been seven seasons of sold-out
games. But it wasn’t an overnight
success. It never is.”
There’s a lesson in that for Victoria, Dakers warned. “People are
expecting us [Royals] to overwhelm the market,” he said.
“But that’s not necessarily
going to occur. Granted, it’s a lot
easier to say to people we’re in the
Western Hockey League as
opposed to the East Coast Hockey
League. But if Kelowna is an
example, it’s going to be one fan,
one group, at a time over a certain
period before we can finally sit
back and say: ‘Wow, this is really
going amazingly.’ ”
It’s still, however, rather startling to hear Dakers say he would
be happy in the initial Royals season for an average attendance of
4,000 — a prediction which seems
on the light side considering that
nearly 3,000 season tickets have
been sold. The Salmon Kings used
to routinely announce more than
that, although on many occasions
there were obviously fewer people in the building than announced.
“I’m talking actual 4,000 people
in the seats [for Royals games],”
said Dakers, of his initial goal.
However it’s received, the
WHL promises a different look at
the Memorial Centre than the last
seven seasons of ECHL.
“They are all the same guys —
the Salmon Kings ECHLers were
all former major-junior players
[and former NCAA players] — but
when you get the players while
they are still in junior [16 to 20
years old] there’s a certain innocence,” said Dakers.
“These are young guys trying
to figure it out. The world is still
their oyster.”
akers addressed a sentiment popular among a certain circle of Victoria
hockey fans that the American
Hockey League, the next rung up
from the ECHL on the pro ladder,
was the better move for Victoria
than the WHL.
“We had a number of chances
to go to the AHL but none of them
made business sense, not even
D
with the Canucks,” said Dakers.
“The AHL is not significantly
different than the ECHL. If we had
gotten the Canucks’ [AHL team,
which instead went to Chicago
from Winnipeg over the summer],
there would have been instant
interest but would the fans have
come out every night? These
things are not always quite so obvious. The Canucks are extremely
big right now, but what if they
don’t win as much in five years’
time? When you looked at the longterm viability, it is the WHL that
always made the most sense for
this market.”
So as John Sebastian sang in
the folk-rock theme song to that
1970s sitcom about a teacher
named Kotter — welcome back.
Come to think of it, the Cougars
were in their first WHL decade in
Victoria during that era of disco
balls, platform shoes and fans
driving to the games at the old
Memorial Arena in really big
Oldsmobiles.
Then the house lights dimmed
on major-junior here in the mid1990s. After 17 years of hockey
trials, and more than a few tribulations for patient Island fans of
the major-junior brand, the WHL
is finally back on Blanshard.